Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

This is one of the risks of taking on the role of the defender: if the dream is to lose yourself in a cause, you might wake up one day and realize that you’ve succeeded, and that there’s hardly anything left of you. Women, who are socially conditioned to be selfless, can be particularly susceptible to a version of heroism that sucks them dry.

Rather, a crush is a way to take up space, and to make something about yourself known to the world.

Part of the curriculum of growing up as a girl is to learn lessons about your vulnerability—if not from your parents, then from a culture that’s fascinated by wounded women.

As legal scholar Michelle Alexander outlines in The New Jim Crow, her bestselling account of the War on Drugs and its impact on the criminal justice system, more black men are currently under correctional control in the United States than were enslaved in 1850.

Since 1980, when the victims’ rights movement took off, higher-education spending in California has decreased by 13 percent, while investment in prisons has grown 436 percent; the state now spends far more money on prisons than it does on colleges and universities.

“Mean world syndrome” was a theory developed in the 1970s by a professor of communications named George Gerbner. Gerbner argued that the more media people consumed, the more likely they were to believe that the world was a dangerous place; in the decades since, a number of studies have borne out Gerbner’s conclusions. Mean world syndrome is one exp

Dollhouses are an almost too-literal example of these women’s shrunken ambitions—of how, when you don’t have control over the big decisions shaping your life, you narrow your focus to a world that’s small enough for you to impose your will on it.

It takes so little for us to shut ourselves off from someone else’s suffering—all he has to do is be wearing the wrong team’s jersey. Human beings are such good othering machines, so talented at dividing up the world into who matters and who doesn’t.

Miniatures are satisfying not because they are grand, but because they are exact. “It is the accuracy, the rightness, that is so rewarding,” according to writer Alice Gregory. “It is a relief . . . to be in the presence of precision—and be allowed to like it.”